An orphan who hated his childhood filmed faces so closely they still unsettle critics
Carl Theodor Dreyer spent his first two years in orphanages and grew up with adoptive parents who made him feel like a debt. He became Denmark's great austere filmmaker, and his 1928 silent The Passion of Joan of Arc, built on close-ups and trial transcripts, ranked ninth in the 2012 critics' poll.
Dreyer was born in Copenhagen in 1889, the illegitimate son of a Swedish maid, Josefine Nilsson, and her married employer, a farmer named Jens Christian Torp. He was adopted by a typographer whose name he was given, and he later remembered being told he had no claim on anything because his mother had escaped paying by dying. He left home and school at 16, but the strict teachings of that household seeped into his films.
He worked as a clerk and journalist, then wrote title cards and screenplays after Nordisk Film hired him in 1913. His early directing met limited success, so he moved to France, where he mixed with Jean Cocteau and Jean Hugo. Joan of Arc fused realism and expressionism; Vampyr, a dreamlike study of fear funded privately by Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg because Danish cinema was broke, followed in 1932. Both flopped, and he made no further feature until the war.
Day of Wrath arrived in 1943, under Nazi occupation, examining the paranoia of seventeenth-century witch hunts in a society ruled by religion. It fixed the style of his sound era: meticulous framing, stark black and white and very long takes. Ordet, adapted from Kaj Munk's play and weaving romance with a crisis of faith, took the Golden Lion at Venice in 1955. His final film, Gertrud in 1964, follows a woman who never regrets her choices; some thought it weaker, but David Thomson called it Dreyer's finest work awaiting rediscovery.
Politically he described himself as conservative, preferring gradual evolution to revolution. He married Ebba Larsen in 1911 and had two children. His dream project, a film about Jesus, was scripted but never shot, stalled by money troubles and his own perfectionism. He died of pneumonia in Copenhagen in 1968, aged 79, and is widely ranked among cinema's greatest directors.
Source: Carl Theodor Dreyer
